Katy Chiles

Assistant Professor

Biography

Katy Chiles teaches and writes about African-American and Native American literature, early American literature and culture, and critical race theory. Her courses include Major Black Writers, the Antebellum Black Atlantic, and Black American Literature and Aesthetics. In 2010, she was awarded the Hodges Excellence in Teaching Award for Assistant Professors by the UT English Department. Her current research focuses on how late eighteenth-century beliefs about the potential mutability of the racialized body structured the way that early American literary texts characterized racial difference. Her research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is currently completing a book, under contract with Oxford University Press, entitled Transformable Race and the Literatures of Early America.

Education

B.A., University of Kentucky
M.A., Ph.D., Northwestern University

Publications

Articles

  • “Becoming Colored in Occom and Wheatley’s Early America.” PMLA 123.5 (2008).
  • “Within and without the Raced Nation: Intratextuality, Martin Delany, and Blake; or the Huts of America.” American Literature 80.2 (2008): 323-52.
  • “Blackened Irish and Brownfaced Amerindians: American Whiteness in Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon.” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 31.2 (Winter 2004): 28-50.

Reviews and Entries

  • “The Law and Black Folk.” Review of Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power After Slavery, by Bryan Wagner. Criticism, 2012.
  • Book Review of Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880, by Phillip Round. Early American Literature, 2012.
  • Review of A Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early Republic, by Bruce Dain. Early American Literature 43.2 (2008): 511-16.
  • “John Marrant.” The Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature. Eds. Hans Ostrom and J. David Macey. Vol. 3. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2005. 1034-35.
  • Review of Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women’s Writing, by Katherine Clay Bassard. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 21.2 (Fall 2002): 411-14.